Donna Karan / Pre-Fall 2014

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Faster, speedier, quicker, faster, speedier, quicker . . . Does anyone in fashion work at the same helter-skelter rhythm as Donna Karan? Take her pre-fall presentation, shown on a shiver-gray December Manhattan morn. Karan had already been up for hours—and she, by her own admission, is not a morning person, either—to get ready for a television interview with Alex Denis on CBS’s This Morning. And then factor in that only a matter of days earlier she had opened her Urban Zen Marketplace, a just-in-time-for-the-holidays opportunity to shop for homewares, kids’ things, etc., which will benefit many deserving causes that Karan supports—Haiti being one of them, with the designer still assiduously raising funds for the devastated island long after many have moved on and forgotten about it.

That’s the thing with Karan: She’s loyal to a fault. And none more so than with her pre-fall, which stays true to where she first started; a collection of clothes—in this case, based on the concept of how much mileage you can get out of a shirt and a skirt—which harks back to the interchangeable, superwearable, seven-easy-pieces concept she debuted in 1985. Now, as then, her notion of easy, breezy, wear-at-your-own-whim sportswear is intended to be like the noise-canceling headphones of fashion: Keeping out the din, the clamor, and, yes, the insane and incessant pace of city life, leaving you to concentrate on what matters.

There are none of the snap-fasten bodysuits of yore this pre-fall, it’s true, but here’s what Karan does have, designed to make life simpler, more straightforward, and—somewhat ironically, given the tempo she manages to keep up—slower: elegant pleated skirts falling to that newer, lower calf-length; ribbon-embroidered jackets that weigh very, very little; columnar cocktail dresses swiped down the side with painterly brushstrokes; gilded blazers with trompe l’oeil lapels; wrap skirts pieced out of suede and leather; and still more suede used for a roomy reefer jacket or swaggering double-breasted coat. In short, clothes that don’t demand anything of anyone other than “wear me.”